Alone in my house in the year 2008, I slipped a DVD into the player and looked back through time. I was watching the original version of 3:10 to Yuma. I was seeing how men and women and children were 50 years ago.
The script is from an Elmore Leonard short story, and the movie was made in 1957. It expresses its time perfectly. I saw how far we have declined in our view of what men and women are to do together in life.
The first thing I noticed was that the men and women were acting together.
The hero rancher named Dan Evans is played by Van Hefflin. He is poor and desperately worried about a drought but he has a hero wife. He is burnt out, at the beginning of the movie, on the edge of giving up. His wife Alice, played by Leora Dana, encourages him to be strong, to borrow money to save the ranch, to save their family, to be resilient. They are a team, and she does not fight himâ€â€Âshe strengthens him. She doesn’t seize power from him; part of her strength is in helping him to see himself as strong.
There are other women in the film. There’s the mother of a stagecoach guard who gets shot. There are wives mentioned by other characters, who keep declaring themselves to be “family men.” There’s a bar girl. They are all, in different degrees, good.
Even the bad guyâ€â€Âa robber who has shot one of his own gang in cold bloodâ€â€Âsoftens up in the company of Alice Evans. He declares how much he would like to have a wife some day, someone tender to come home to every night.
One senses the recent memory of World War II in the opening 20 minutes of the movie. The issue of the guilt of the bystander is real between Dan and Alice because there’s an interchange between husband and wife about how wrong it is to “stand by and do nothing” when bad things are happening. Alice says, “It seems terrible that something bad can happen and all anybody can do is stand by and watch.â€ÂÂ
Dan’s wife and kids want him to take action to save the farm, and he does. There is a killer who must be put on the train to the jail in Yuma, and mild-mannered Dan takes on the scary but lucrative assignment to guard him.
In 3:10 to Yuma, men and women are on a common mission: to bring up children, to protect life, to civilize the world, and to be good together. It’s a 1957 vision.
But now, wow. No one watching this movie in 1957 would have been able to imagine the “war of all against all” that was coming to men and women in the U.S. Not the most drugged-out hipster, say William Burroughs, could have foreseen the hostile reality that now holds the public stage of American life. Not the worst tequila nor the most tainted injected drug could have, in 1957, produced hallucinations as ugly as the daylight nightmare between the sexes we now live.
The ideal of the loyal and tender wife is gone. Today we are so advanced, we have women playing Sheriffâ€â€ÂI mean attorney general. Consider Janet Reno as an example of the breed, or more currently, Martha Coakley, the current state attorney general of Massachusetts. The concept is not impossible in theoryâ€â€Âbut the reality? What passes for acceptable in this era would have made the women in Yuma sick.
Last week in this state, in the restroom of a DeMoulas Supermarket, some guy reached his arm under the stall wall and groped the upper leg of a four-year-old boy who was standing there trying to pee. The boy said something; his father was right outside; he opened the adjoining stall and punched the guy who’d grabbed his son in the face. Twice. It was a 71-year-old DeMoulas janitor. (Non-English-speaking, by the way.)
Then law enforcement showed up. They arrested the father. They charged a man who was protecting his child with assault and battery. The father faces a trial and permanent registry in a database (just for being arrested). The cops let the old janitor with the wandering hands go with a summons.
Nothing wrong with that, declared our state’s Big-Girl-Sheriff Martha Coakley. In a radio interview, she blithely displayed a black hole where her knowledge of right and wrong should be. She is no Alice Evans. Astoundingly, she criticized the father: “We strongly discourage self-help.”
Trying to protect the innocent and push the bad guys back? Even in the cynical 1950s, the script-writer saw the point of the ideal. But we have descended into some lower world where self-aggrandizing types like Martha Coakley are in charge. The drive to protect the innocent has dried up as hard as the desert landscape in Yuma.
Men and women working together to do the right thing? Forget about it. Women protecting the tender souls of children? That’s another dusty notion that half the women in the country don’t subscribe to any more.
But those dusty notions were real once. We can see it on a 1957 DVD called 3:10 to Yuma. Watch it and get sad.
